Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday January 09, 2014 @10:57PM
from the make-it-one dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced new integration between Gmail and Google+ that sees your social connections show up in auto-complete when you're composing an email. Google says the feature is rolling out "over the next couple of days" to everyone that uses Gmail and Google+."

You aren't actually forced to use G+, even if it is enabled on your account. Realistically, Google won't be able to force you to use G+ either since that would break interoperability with other email providers.

As for the privacy concerns associated with G+, they should exist whether or not these are independent services. It is the same company collecting your data after all.

A few years ago we created a gmail account for the condo administration to communicate with the residents....Recently I had to go through the whole "upgrade the account to google+ and you can't opt out" rigamarole.

I have a gmail account and I don't recall anytime that I was required to upgrade to google+. Sure, I have had the occasional "friendly reminders" that I need to update my contact information or I could permanently lose access to my account if I forget my password, but other than that no troubles. What the hell did you do to piss them off so much?

Who knows? Like I said, Google was forcing me to upgrade to Google+ and it was complaining that the name didn't live up to their exalted standards. They said they wanted other people to be able to contact us. If we were a business, we should create a google+ page. Guess what? As a condo admin, I'm not paid, and I'm not interested in creating a google+ page. Furthermore, a condo board in Quebec is not a business so why should I care?

The main problem Google seems to have is with the name. It's a long sequence of letters and numbers at gmail.com.

We don't want other people to find us. We don't want to find other people.

We are not going to help Google+'s bogus social networking numbers simply because like I said we're boring. Just let us keep our name...

The pop-up I get is in French but it boils down to that the name "doesn't sound" like a name and we must change it. Even though I sent the document showing that it's the name registered with the government, it's not good enough for Google??

Use different accounts. I have several Google accounts for different purposes. All are connected to chrome where I want them to be. Nothing professional ever gets on my personal accounts, where I look at political stuff and the like that my colleagues have no business knowing. I only use my personal accounts outside work hours, or on my phone. In any case, colleagues only see what I want them to see. It takes a while to get used to (forgetting to do work-related searches in the work browser) but when you do it's really, really handy. Problem solved? Sure, they could get at my accounts if the boss really wanted to but the boss could also install a key-logger and I'm not that paranoid...

By your reasoning Microsoft never had a monopoly to leverage either. Take your double standard and cram it. "Monopoly" in the context of anti-trust and anti-competition laws means "dominant market position",

Microsoft had a >85% share of the desktop market, and this is a point Federal Investigators made at the time they were considering bringing charges against Microsoft. None of those competing operating systems, taken together, had anywhere near enough market share to disrupt Microsoft effectively targeting Netscape and nearly putting them out of business. The E.U. agreed with this assessment, and brought similar charges to those brought by the DOJ in the U.S..

This is a matter of historical fact and court record.

Google has a dominant market position in search, webmail and web video, Microsoft has/had a dominant position in desktop operating systems.

Apparently you don't understand what wielding monopolistic power means either, but lever let details stop you from getting your frothing at the mouth on.

Say we grant your premise for the sake of argument. What services is Google forcing you to use, in place of what other services, by leveraging their dominant position? The only thing they are doing is using G+ as the primary placeholder for their combined credentials store, and even then, unless you are creating a new YouTube account, you can choose not to attach your existing YouTube account to the G+ credential.

The only thing that they are doing, which I think is kind of piss-poor on their part, but has nothing to do with the use of monopolistic power in any way, is preventing you creating *new* separate accounts for their various services, the same way you are unable to create separate accounts for Word or Excel on the Office365 site.

From a services management perspective, maintaining multiple back end account databases is a PITA, so I can understand why they are doing this, although I really hate that they are doing the whole Facebook-like thing and insisting on "Real Identities or well known pseudonyms", and denying account creation outside those categories. I think anonymity is important, but you aren't going to resolve that particular issue by having separate accounts, since giving that up is pretty much part of their TOS agreement, just as it's becoming part of everyone else's.

What planet do you live on? What other large sites out there allow users to post videos? YouTube is easily, by far, the largest site of its type.

GMail doesn't seem market dominant, but I'd be willing to look at numbers if you have them relative to Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail/Outlook.com

Here again you seem to be out of touch with reality, but maybe not so much as with the YouTube comment above. Hotmail has been going down for ages, ever since the MS takeover and conversion to "Live", though maybe they're doing a little better now with outlook.com but I kinda doubt it, and Yahoo's been going down the toilet for years now too. I don't have any hard data, but I definitely see far more people with Gmail addresses than the other two.